A GOOD YEAR!

Sri Lankans would be back to the grind after the New Year holidays that are the fourth that have been celebrated in the post-conflict atmosphere of a warm and uplifting peace. New Year traditions are kept, despite the end of Westernization that has threatened to warp the time honoured New Year spirit.

But this was one festival that essentially escaped the commercial character that’s appended to other celebrations that are now religion to most. The IPL is religion to the Indians for instance.

Watching the IPL, it is difficult not to think about how far India has come in becoming a commercial mecca that enriches large multinational companies. Pepsi, KFC, Mc Donalds -- these seem to be the common denominators of present Indian life. This new commercial ethos has spawned a powerful political force and it is not surprising that India and the U.S walk in lockstep.

Mahathma Gandhi the father of the Indian nation would have been aghast in many ways. He saw the virtues of simplicity, and the deleterious effects of being tied to the forces of foreign capital - but most of all, he emancipated the Indians from colonial domination for a reason.

Sri Lanka is in relative terms not caught up so much in the thrall of these foreign market forces, and that is partly because our markets are size-wise miniscule compared to India’s. This may be considered a disadvantage by the investment experts and the market analysts, but it is sage-wisdom that a disadvantage could always be turned into an advantage.

For the first time in centuries, Sri Lankans are aware of the need to see themselves as fiercely independent, and this stems from the results of the war victory. The war taught many of us many things, but the most important of the lessons obviously was the one that Sri Lankans do not have to order their lives by the received wisdom of the pundits. Today, the same finger wagging experts who told us that the war could not be won, say that we cannot develop the economy unless we do anything and everything the Western governments tell us, as the major part of our trade is with the West.

The general alienation of such pundits from the sentiments of the common mass of people can be stunning. For example, Ranil Wickremesinghe the leader of the opposition has written a hagiography for the former British Premier Margaret Thatcher on her death last week. In these columns we did write about Thatcher as well - as did several others in many parts of the world.

But all these writers kept things in perspective, and had a keen eye on dissecting the Thatcher era excesses that were in the first place a bane to the British more than they were to others in the rest of the world who were also in some way affected by these policies of sheer insensitivity to the plight of the working classes as a result of Margaret Thatcher’s fealty to unbridled buccaneer capitalism. But Wickremesinghe was never able to see the other side, whereas the President’s condolence message got everything right because it didn’t make any hagiography of Thatcher but didn’t also embarrass anybody at the time of the death of a leader who was after all, one of the forerunners to the kind of conservatism that David Cameron the British Prime Minister spearheads today. This message avoided the pratfalls, and spoke of Thatcher’s real positives such as her zeal in combatting terrorism.

Those leaders that are not attuned to the desires and sentiments of the large mass of people are bound to sooner or later realize their folly. Ranil Wickremesinghe learnt that lesson in war-time. His craven policy of appeasing the West went to the extent of publicly propagandizing in support of the excesses of the LTTE during the so called ceasefire agreement he signed with Velupillai Prabhakaran. That was a turning point in our country’s history. People learnt that those who say we must hitch our wagon to the West or perish are inverting the reality - which is that if we blindly kowtow to the West, we perish. The wisdom that held good then in war-time, holds equally good in the context of our post-war economy and all that it entails.